Words: what are they, and do animals have them?
Since the word is not a well-defined entity like the sentence, one looks for findings that may help to clarify it. The effect of nonsense words on the young child's sorting of taxonomic versus thematic alternatives is said to be such a finding. A young child given, say, duck as a sample, goose and nest as alternatives, picks nest (thematic alternative), whereas the older child picks goose (taxonomic). However, if told the duck is called "ZLT" in Croatian, and asked to "find another ZLT", the young child shifts to goose. Markman and Hutchinson (1984) claim this demonstrates that young children know that words are "names of object categories" (and that this knowledge protects them against false hypotheses, facilitating their acquisition of words). In the present study, we applied the Markman et al. procedure to young "language-trained" chimpanzees. The animals were at an early stage of training, having used "words" solely in the function "X goes with Y", or "if shown X, get Y". Although these functions are notably weaker than "X is the name of a category", the animals showed a thematic-taxonomic shift, thus behaving like young children. The Markman-Hutchinson interpretation of the shift effect is unsatisfactory in two respects: (1) the shift effect can be explained without attributing any knowledge of what a word is to either creature, child or ape; more important (2), the interpretation does not address the main question: what is a "name" and what does a child think it is? We conclude with a discussion of what a word is, appealing to information retrieval on the one hand, and intention to refer on the other.
Premack
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Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19174.
D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D002648:Child; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000523:psychology*; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior